The Music Man

HellSpam writes "MacNETv2 interviewed a man who is claiming the title of "King of the Pirates". The man has over 900,000 songs, a collection that rivals even the iTunes music store(!). From the article:"I spent the day with a guy who spends every free moment collecting music. So far his music collection rivals Apple's iTunes Music Store, and his goal is to own a copy of every song ever recorded. Can he do it? Maybe, but you know what they say; it's the journey not the destination.""

Comments

Disconnect and motivation

[daveschroeder]

"...a man who is claiming the title of 'King of the Pirates'...and his goal is to own a copy of every song ever recorded..."

I thought there was a slight issue there.

I decided to look at the article, and somehow, he believes that downloading the music isn't illegal, but burning it to CD is.

And, also from the article, he apparently is doing this because he is on a quest to preserve all of the music of Western civilization in the event that a (presumably Panislamic) terrorist detonates a nuclear weapon in, say, downtown Chicago, precipitating a complete and devastating collapse of the economies of the US and the West, changing the face of the currently free nations in the world forever (and losing all of our music along with it).

Why or how, exactly, one individual person with consumer-grade storage and computing equipment operating out of a residence is the absolute best way to do this is not covered.

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[OverlordQ]

"...a man who is claiming the title of 'King of the Pirates'...and his goal is to own a copy of every song ever recorded..."

He can't have his cake and eat it too. He'll have to settle for "King of the Brainwashed Consumer Zombies" or "King of RIAA Lawsuits"

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[micromoog]

It's a simple typgraphical error. They misspelled '0wn'.

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[P-Nuts]

I decided to look at the article, and somehow, he believes that downloading the music isn't illegal, but burning it to CD is.

Well, it has been the practice of the RIAA only to go after the people sharing their music with others. Also from the article: "I don't think there has been a single song pirated from my collection."

So it appears he isn't King of the Pirates, but King of the Freeloaders. (Not that I condone either.)

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[grub]

I decided to look at the article

Before posting a reply? I think this is a /. first!

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[sulli]

It's a simple typgraphical error.

Indeed.

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[wankledot]

I've never really thought about it, but it's funny to think that "pirate" is being used for people that share what they have willingly with others. The pirates being sued are the ones giving it away, not the ones taking it.

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[cpt kangarooski]

Well, it has been the practice of the RIAA only to go after the people sharing their music with others.

That doesn't really mean anything. The law is pretty clear that downloading is infringing, and the courts have uniformly agreed whenever the issue has come before them.

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[jmcmunn]

Actually, read the article. he does not consider himself a pirate at all, and makes no claim to the title. Here's the quote from the article.

"There are people that know about what I am doing and believe in it. I just want to be an historian, a gatekeeper. Anything but a pirate. I don't consider myself a pirate."

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[YrWrstNtmr]

The thing is, it's not 'his' to give away. Now, if he had purchased all 900,000 songs, that would be a different story. He'd merely be a gullible, formerly rich person, instead of a /. hero.

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[bugbread]

It is odd, but if you think in terms of conventional media, it's pretty accurate. For example, if a guy in China makes bootlegged Holywood DVDs, we call him a "pirate", but we generally don't call the person who bought the DVDs "pirates". I'm not addressing if it's wrong or right, I'd just never noticed until now that with physical objects, the producer is normally called a "pirate", the item a "pirated item", and the purchaser a "purchaser of pirated goods", but with data, both the producer and receiver are called "pirates".

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[liquidsin]

He's got the best reasoning ever. How could any patriotic American jury convict this man of a crime if he's doing it to keep the terrorists from destroying the American culture and economy?! He's a good patriot! The RIAA has plugged away at their lawsuits through bad publicity like "RIAA sues grandmother and 12 yr old girl" but would they be so stupid as to sue this guy and invite headlines like "Recording Industry helps terrorists destroy American culture"?

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[Mr. No Skills]

He'll be OK then until he gives content to someone else. He probably should "donate" his collection to a public library somehow to get some protection and legitamacy to being a historian.

While a worthy goal, I think its somewhat an impossible task. Much recorded music is not relased in a fashion that he's going to know about it (think about a band selling homemade CDs from a stage). But, if he gets some legitamacy he might be able to get lots of people to donate recordings to him.

Brings up another interesting question: what do the RIAA members do in the way of disaster recovery and historical preservation? Seems to me they have a responsibility to this since they're reaping all the profits from us.

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[sik0fewl]

Clearly, that should have been "typ0graphical error".

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[Jason Earl]

The RIAA goes after folks "distributing" their copyrighted works because that what triggers the copy protection laws in the U.S. Basically U.S. laws were designed around stopping organized crime for making and selling counterfeit copies of popular albums, books, etc. The laws assumed that expensive equipment was needed to make these copies, and that a sophisticated system of underground marketing was needed to get the copies into legitimate channels. Because of this the penalties for distributing copyrighted material illegally are very very harsh. After all, the people that used to engage in the illegal distribution of copyrighted material were the most pernicious sort of organized criminal.

These laws are seem somewhat ridiculous in an age where a 14 year-old girl with a $300 computer and a broadband connection can distribute gigabytes of copyrighted material, but that's how things work. Fortunately for filesharers the RIAA has not been keen on sending folks to prison.

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[goates]

"what do the RIAA members do in the way of disaster recovery and historical preservation?"

Of course they're backing everything up. Just wait 10-20 years when they re-release it all on whatever media or digital format we're using at that time. Then they'll reap even more profits from us.

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[surprise_audit]

what do the RIAA members do in the way of disaster recovery and historical preservation?

Perhaps they use Linus' method: "real men don't do backups - they post their code to the Internet, and let others mirror it".

No, really, the RIAA could be doing exactly that. This would explain why they haven't done what seems blindingly obvious to us - switch from CD distribution to network channels. As long as they distribute CDs at inflated prices, the P2P networks will thrive, thereby maintaining their backups copies. If they switch to a business model that kills the P2P networks, they'd have to spend enormous amounts of money archiving and preserving everything...

Ahh, if only Linus would apply for a business method patent on the "upload and mirror" backup strategy...

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[typhoonius]

While a worthy goal, I think its somewhat an impossible task.

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing." --Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales

Of course, it's an impossible goal, but I think it's one of those "shoot for the moon, land among the stars" kind of things. Mind, I think the pirate guy is a nutcase, but impossible goals aren't a bad thing necessarily.

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[Idarubicin]

Recording Industry helps terrorists destroy American culture

I hate to break it to the terrorists, but they're waaaay too late.

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[SnapShot]

It isn't an impossible task, he's just going about it the wrong way. Most MP3's are 3MB or so, right? Why not write a program that randomly generates files in the 2 to 5MB range, throws out the ones that aren't valid MP3, and puts the rest in his library. Not only would you get every song ever recorded but you would get every variation of every song ever recorded (at least in that range). Even better, he would own the copyright on every new song that will ever be generated from this point forward.

It's really pretty simple; here's a code fragment:

for(int i = 0; i < Math.pow(2, 5242880), ++i) {
File f = generateRandomFile(i);
if(isValidMP3(f)) {
saveToLibrary(f))
}
}

No need to thank me, I'm just trying to do a service for the future generations and save this guy the headache of all those lawsuits...

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[daeley]

American culture is quite beautiful, rich, and storied.

The mistake is looking for it on television, movies, or radio.

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[UID1000000]

This is an interesting thought that they want a copy of everything available but there are a few flaws to that idea.

First the most obvious is quality. Let's suppose that Diana Krall's greatest hits and I can only find it at 96Kbps. That's gonna suck. From a quality standpoint the question would be why? They'd have to spend money to remaster it etc.

Secondly is that not everyone with a collection is online all the time or sharing at all of the times. Would the RIAA appeal to the FCC to "intervere" with our PCs and simulataneously access the web?

As for the business method patent that might be a good idea. I don't know why Linus would though... Can the internet surpass something like FlashCopy? It seems that the web would come to a screaming halt if I tried to back up 18 terabytes of a data to the web.

Oh shit, I just blew up the internet.

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[wankledot]

I understand that, I was just relating it to the RIAA's efforts, which have (up to this point) targeted the sharers, not the downloaders.

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[Buran]

Happened a lot with early lunar probes, especially the Soviet ones -- for varying reasons they'd miss the firing that was supposed to drop them into lunar orbit, or on a collision course ... and off they went into the wild black yonder, eventually winding up in solar orbit. Being as the Sun is a star, they got exactly what you said they did!

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[Al Dimond]

Yes. The media is "pirated". It became "pirated" by the act of "piracy". The person performing the "piracy" (making the media "pirated") is the "pirate".

Yarrrrrr.

Re:Disconnect and motivation

[Hatta]

While a worthy goal, I think its somewhat an impossible task.

It's not really a worthy goal. If you read the article, you see he's worried about terrorists destroying all the music in the world. If we have a nuclear holocaust, what makes him think his fileserver will be spared? If he's downloading it, that means other people already have it. So there's a distributed archive of all that music already, and a distributed archive is the only kind you can expect to survive the end of life as we know it.

Can't be done.

[zerguy]

What is this guy smoking, wanting to own a copy of every song ever recorded? This clearly cannot be done. What if I record a song on my hard drive, then take it out and smash the hard drive to peices? Oops, this guy fails.

Journey?

[dr_dank]

Can he do it? Maybe, but you know what they say; it's the journey not the destination.

Don't worry, I'm sure he's got Journey in there too.

Re:Journey?

[Prince Vegeta SSJ4]

Somewhere on a p2p network.

Typing beside you, here in the dark Feeling your mouse click with mine Softly you IM, you're so sincere How could our love be so blind We sailed on together We drifted apart And here you are on my screen.

So now I come to you, with open ports Nothing to hide, believe what I say So here I am with open ports Hoping you'll see what your share means to me Open ports

Re:Journey?

[VivianC]

Prince,

You rock! That has got to be one of the funniest things I've seen here. Sadly, most mods will be too young to see the humor. Rock on!

Re:Journey?

[Pope]

Larry is given a margarita, and invites everyone to party. The entire crowd cheers, and Journey's "Any Way You Want It" starts playing loudly as everyone starts dancing while drinking a lot of liquor.

Lisa: Who's playing that music?
Marge: And where's all that liquor coming from?
Homer: It's a party, Marge. Doesn't have to make sense.
[a Hawaiian lei falls from out of the sky onto Homer's neck]
[Homer's handed a drink]
Homer: Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo! Oh, yeah!

And the irony is

[debian4life]

He will probably never have to deal with the RIAA ever.

The hard part...

[Capt'n Hector]

The hard part isn't collecting the music. It's giving meaningful meta-data to it. iTMS doesn't just have ~900,000 songs, it has metadata for each one, including album covers.

Re:The hard part...

[Soporific]

Musicbrainz is a great way to fill in all the missing mp3 information and there is even an Amazon cover art grabber available if you search. I renamed about 4000 mp3's in the space of about two days doing this. ~S

Re:The hard part...

[Anonymous Coward]

That works for popular / semi-popular music. I've had a hell of a time sorting my collection of pre-1950s music. ~12,000 songs from the late 1800s (wax cylindars) to the late 40s (big band.)

Re:The hard part...

[kaszeta]

The hard part isn't collecting the music. It's giving meaningful meta-data to it. iTMS doesn't just have ~900,000 songs, it has metadata for each one, including album covers.

Who needs meta-data? I was planning on having it select a random track and waiting until it got to the right song...

Re:The hard part...

[ciroknight]

I hate to tell ya, but the best thing you can do is take one for the team and fill in all of the metadata you can. Then make sure you can distribute not only the metadata but the files themselves so that the great music from those eras isn't lost due to data rot.

I'd do it also

[Soporific]

If I could afford the hard drive space. Then it wouldn't be an issue, but they fill up fast. I suspect quite a few people around here have the same problem.

~S

Wonder if ..

[torpor]

.. he's got all of ours ...

Storage for that would be...

[lukewarmfusion]

From my estimation (and relatively limited library, it seems): 2400 songs = 10 GB

So 900,000 songs would come out to be approximately 3,750 GB... or 3.75 TB of music.

We're not worthy...we're not worthy...

Re:Storage for that would be...

[BawbBitchen]

Well it depends on the bit rate, etc. I have a library of all my CD's ripped (I work at a radio station and a record store so..). The total number of MP3 at 192 bit I have is 28498. About 10k of them have the album art. They currently take 144GB of harddrive space on a .5TB RAID5 array (4x160GB drives - IDE). I am slowly add more MP3s. iTunes does quite a good job of handling the files BTW. I am running iTunes 4.7 on a 1.03Ghz iBook with 768MB of RAM. The MP3s are mount via an NFS share from the server which is a 1Ghz AMD with 512MB of RAM running OpenBSD 3.6 w/RAIDFrame. Most of the time I am running the connection over an Airport base station 802.11G, for the iBook with the server connect to a 100MB switch. If I am doing massive file management I do connect the iBook via 100MB ethernet.

Google Cache

[sik0fewl]

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:-7B7abphgzIJ: www.macnet2.com/more.php%3Fid%3D536_0_10_0+&hl =en

Grand Mariner

[NitsujTPU]

Our man, let's call him Doug, greeted me with a huge hug, a broad smile on his face, drink in hand (Grand Mariner of all things), and invited me in to his den.

Grand Mariner? That must be a pirate's drink, eh Matey?

Occasionally we land-lubbers will drink Grand Marnier though.

Re:Grand Mariner

[sonicattack]

Hear the rhyme of the ancient mariner,
See his eye as he downloads one of three
Mesmerises one of the Kazaa guests
Stay here and listen to the nightmares of MP3!

Article Text

[Anonymous Coward]

From Google Cache ( http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=cache%3Ahttp%3 A%2F%2Fwww.macnet2.com%2Fmore.php%3Fid%3D536_0_10_ 0&btnG=Google+Search&meta= ):

The Music Man - King Of The Pirates Has A Goal - Own It All!

"I spent the day with a guy who spends every free moment collecting music. So far his music collection rivals Apple's iTunes Music Store, and his goal is to own a copy of every song ever recorded. Can he do it? Maybe, but you know what they say; it's the journey not the destination."

What do you say to someone who has a digital music collection that exceeds 900,000 songs? This was the question I was pondering during my long drive to interview the man who claims he is on a quest to own a copy of ever song ever recorded. What do you say? I think the only way to begin such an interview would be to ask "why?"...

When I pulled into the driveway of the King of the Pirates, an upper middle class neighborhood of stylish homes and SUV's, Infiniti's, and more Mini-Coopers than necessary, I was surprised by the normalcy of it all. His home was nothing short of spectacular, his wife a mid-30's ex-underwear model (honest!), and his two kids well groomed, apparently intelligent, and very wired. (As in technology-wise, not ADD) This is not the home I would have thought would be the enclave of someone out to pirate the hell out of the music industry. This was going to be very interesting...

Our man, let's call him Doug, greeted me with a huge hug, a broad smile on his face, drink in hand (Grand Mariner of all things), and invited me in to his den. He was absolutely thrilled to finally be able to talk to someone who was actually interested in what he was doing. Seems that 'the wife' as he calls her, was bored to tears hearing about his latest collections, or the latest Bit Torrent site he found; a treasure trove of hard to find music all ripped at 256-bits. The wife wants to know why he doesn't play more golf, like his friends. "Golf is the most boring game in the world, what I am doing is much more fun."

His Pirate Room - A MacGeek's Heaven on Earth

Doug has devoted one of the extra bedrooms (he has 7 of them) into what could only be described as The War Room. He owns three Power Mac G5's, and just added two iMac G5's. Several external 250GB firewire drives are attached to the iMacs, and sitting in the corner are a stack of at least 6 other external drives, all 300GB, brand new, boxed, and just waiting to go online.

He has two cable modems and one DSL. One cable modem is "for the family", the other dedicated to his quest. The DSL line is a backup and is sometimes used when he had discovered a new site that offers a slew of new torrents he wants to mine. The wife, and the kids are all connected to the Internet through an Airport network, with multiple Airport Express base stations scattered among the house.

All the Macs in his command and control room have JBL Creature speaker systems, some white, some blue, and a burgundy one that I have never seen before. The entire room is lit with indirect 'rope' lights, giving the room a feel of living in the Star Trek universe. There are a couple of rich soft brown leather chairs and one long, very plush, baby-butt soft leather sofa that just screams comfort. I took a seat on the sofa and never felt more pampered or more comfortable. I made a mental note that once our pets' pass on this was going to be the sofa in MY house. For all I cared this interview could go for days, once ensconced in this incredible piece of furniture I didn't want to leave...ever.

The Wife bought us a pot of coffee (Jamaican Blue Mountain), two cups, and cream and a small bowl of 'equal'. With the coffee was a plate of fresh (fresh!) Dunkin Donuts Cinnamon Sticks. The interaction between The Wife and Doug showed that these two were a happy couple. The seemed to really like each other, and that, my friends, is more rare than you might think.

Once I got through ogling the various M

Re:Article Text

[faust2097]

Typical, 900,0000 songs, thousands in computer hardware and speakers with 2" drivers.

Hmm...

[numbware]

... Slashdotted already? The error page is nice though:

"Problem!?"

It's just so detailed and descriptive.

He must be working carefully

[eltoyoboyo]

To avoid those nasty RIAA sniffers. He probably is not sharing back. Of course the article is already DOA so I could not say for sure. As long as he is not leaving Madonna or Usher albums on his share directory, he probably has been existing below the radar. Whether or not you believe what he is doing is aboveboard, you have to admire his tenacity. I wonder if he has listened to all 900,000 to see if they all are high quality and they don't have someone shouting "Eat me" dubbed right in the middle of the song.

I wonder how many songs are dups?

[vision33r]

Ever seen the same song with different file sizes, bit-rate, and versions? He's gonna have tons of dups..

That has to be...

[modifried]

.. the most confusing slashdotted page I've seen. The article page says, in it's entirety:
"Problem!?"

With both the question mark and exclamation mark, I get to wondering. Is it asking me if there is a problem? Is it telling me there's a problem? Or is this some sort of statement based on quantum theory, and is both asking and telling me there is a problem at the same time?

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

About 4.4 Terrabytes

Average MP3 is about 5MB

900,000 songs * 5MB = 4,500,000 MB

4,500,000 MB / 1024 MB in a gigabyte = 4394.53125 GB

The RIAA could make a lot of money here....

[charlieb0y]

At $250,000 penalty (I THINK that's the max) per song, the RIAA could make 225 BILLION off this guy alone! I bet they lose that much per year because of him...........

Re:The RIAA could make a lot of money here....

[blamanj]

Actually, this illustrates why the RIAA statistics about how much money they're losing is wrong.

I suspect a lot of people do this: Download because they can. They're pack rats and they're in it for the thrill of the hunt. There's no way they actually listent to all the music, and no way they'd ever buy the equivalent to everything they've downloaded.

So the 1 download = $1 lost revenue is completely bogus. But we knew that.

Smells like bullshit

[Pope]

I read this a few days ago. Quite frankly, not only is his reasoning completely ridiculous, but his methods are also totally suspect. I'm sure his ISPs haven't noticed anything peculiar about 100% downloading, all the time?

Pending a secondary source, I call BS on this one.

Re:Smells like bullshit

[pknoll]

Aye, the Bullometer(TM) went off on this for me, too. From the article text:

Several external 250GB firewire drives are attached to the iMacs, and sitting in the corner are a stack of at least 6 other external drives, all 300GB, brand new, boxed, and just waiting to go online.

To house 9000 songs at average bitrates (as an earlier poster pointed out) he'd need a shade over 4TB of storage. That's 16 250GB drives, which to almost anyone is more than "several".

If this guy was real and as rich as he's made out to be, why wouldn't he have just bought an Xserve with an Xserve RAID?

Re:Smells like bullshit

[cyril3]

He didn't say it was online did he? He did say that he burned it all to DVD regularly.

why wouldn't he have just bought an Xserve with an Xserve RAID

He is going to but its like drugs, the need just creeps up on you. First i's a bigger internal drive, then all your ide channels are full and you get an industrial strength DVD burner but you can't keep up and you need something NOW and the man shows you an external usb 300GB drive and you are in heaven. But the first one is never enough.

and the man is going to sell you 300GB external drives every day rather than one big Xserve rig. Being rich never =ed being smart.

Sure...

[gillbates]

it's the journey not the destination...

Because the prison bus ride is definitely more scenic than the prison yard, right?

• New computer: $799
• Broadband connection: $59
• Lawyer for the RIAA lawsuit: $5,000
• Fines and prison term: 5 years, plus 130 million dollars.
• Getting mentioned on Slashdot as King of the Pirates: Priceless.

Some things, money can't buy. But if you want to get busted for copyright infringement on a shoestring budget, only Slashdot will do.

Math doesn't add up

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

900,000(songs) / 1000(songs/day) = 900 days > 10 months

note that he "started slowly", which i assume means less than 1000 songs / day

the math does not add up for me. anyone can fix the anomaly?

And just who decided he was King?

[xenocide2]

Did some tart in a lake give him a sword? Help, help! I'm being oppressed!

The RIAA will be raking in the $

[BashDot]

900,000 songs * $125,000 per song = (wait for it)

a $112.5 BILLION dollar fine

The world's worst leech0r

[Aim Here]

What's this guy's soulseek/emule IDs? He's going straight to the top of my ban-list for not sharing!

Non-sharers are killing piracy! Help stamp it out!

I used to play that game too

[revery]

But I quit.

There's no End Game.

Backups?

[seniorcoder]

According to a previous poster, 900,000 songs * 3MB per song = 2.7TB of storage required.

What media does he use for backups?
I estimate something like 570 blank DVDs for one backup. I would hate to think how long it would take to take a backup.

Then again, what does he use for primary storage? That's a whole load of hard disk space.
Without paying for copyright infringement lawsuits, just the cost of the disk space is already outside the hardware budget approved by my wife. Expensive hobby.

So I guess he doesn't

[Stone316]

have a bittorrent setup?

damn..

With Apologies to W. S. Gilbert

[Anonymous Coward]

KING:
Oh, better far to live and die
Under the brave black flag I fly,
Than play a sanctimonious part
With a pirate head and a pirate heart.
Away to the iPod world go you,
Where downloads all are fine to do;
But I'll be true to the song I sing,
And live and die a Pirate King.

For I am a Pirate King!

And it is, it is a glorious thing
To be a Pirate King!

For I am a Pirate King!

ALL: You are!

Hurrah for the Pirate King!

KING:
And it is, it is a glorious thing
To be a Pirate King.

ALL:
It is!
Hurrah for the Pirate King!
Hurrah for the Pirate King!

KING:
When I sally forth to seek my prey
I help myself in a royal way.
I rip a few more songs, it's true,
Than a well-bred listener ought to do;
But many a head of a *AA,
If he wants music to play his way,
Must manage somehow to get through
More dirty work than e'er I do,

For I am a Pirate King!
And it is, it is a glorious thing
To be a Pirate King!

For I am a Pirate King!

ALL:
You are!
Hurrah for the Pirate King!

KING:
And it is, it is a glorious thing
To be a Pirate King.

ALL:
It is!
Hurrah for the Pirate King!
Hurrah for the Pirate King!

A Letter to Mr. King of the Pirates

[akiy]

Dear Mr King of the Pirates,

We happen to own a lot of songs that are not in your collection. We would love to send a couple of people over to provide you with the songs that you are missing. Can you please send us your home address and what you look like? We'll be right over.

Sincerely,
The Recording Industry Association of America

Re:Warning, Amazon affiliate link!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Too late. I already ordered 5 copies.

Speaking as a person who possesses a lot of music:

[5n3ak3rp1mp]

The problem is not collecting the music. The problem is that his music collection probably looks like this:

Frank Zappa - genre - Sheik Yerbouti - (no year)
BRITNEY SPERS - pop - Oops I did it Again - 1900
Benni Benassi - Satisfaction vs In Da Club - Dance - 2004

etc. It would peeve the hell out of me to see that crap, and I see it all the time, because it seems like people who don't take the time/money to buy music also really don't give two shits about good tagging (or good ripping, but that situation is getting better). So, I find myself doing lots of manual work to fix the meta information, add valid "year" data, add track and disc number data, check off "compilation" for those, fix genres and spelling, etc. Most of the time, if it looks like the song has crap ID3 tags, I don't even bother downloading it, it's not worth the extra work. This is really the extra value you get out of using something like the iTunes Music Store to buy songs (and I do).

Thus, it becomes a rather huge management problem to fix tags and remove duplicates. And the process of removing duplicates is not even very logical, often- If the same exact song is on two separate albums, do you keep both? Without listening to both songs to see if one is ripped better, do you tend to remove the older or newer duplicate? What if the songs are actually the same but one of the titles is completely wrong so you can't tell? Etc. I won't even go into the logic for picking genres... I say Depeche Mode is "Goth/New Wave" and Nine Inch Nails is "Industrial", but nobody else seems to think so, for example. Perhaps the whole idea of "genre" is an archaic holdover from physical music stores, but it can be a useful extra tidbit to help create smart playlists from (in iTunes) as well as help discover new music related to what you already know.

I will shamelessly plug two things here: http://www.musicbrainz.org/ to help you tag music correctly, and the Roku Soundbridge to listen to your collection wirelessly.

Re:iTunes

[notthe9]

He uses Filemaker Pro.

BitTorrent != Sharing ?

[russx2]

Ok, so this guy claims he only downloads and never, ever shares his music (and hence he's not a pirate). And yet he claims to get a lot of his music from torrents... Unless he's satisfied with very slow download speeds (and being a complete leech!) I think I'm seeing a flaw here.

Re:BitTorrent != Sharing ?

[Agret]

I think it only counts as sharing when you share a complete copy. Most of the time BitTorrent downloads are complete from many different sources at once so you never get a complete copy off any 1 person unless they are the only seed.

he is obviously sharing with others

[etaluclac]

Since he claims to get a lot of music off of Bittorrent, this guy is definitely giving it to others to get a decent download speed--and at 900000 songs, plenty of others have acquired other music thanks to his "hobby."

That's the nature of the protocol--you can't take without giving back. Even if somehow downloading but not sharing the music were legal, he'd still be breaking the law.

Re:The unasked question: is he a leech

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget about leeching. I can't believe they didn't ask him how to reconcile his insistence that "I don't distribute the music, I only download it" with the fact that he uses torrents.

Fuzzy Math

[JNighthawk]

Ahem. He has THREE broadband connections. That's $130,005,976 not $130,005,858. Don't spread your fuzzy math around here!

What a nutjob!

[d_jedi]

He claims to be an attorney, but thinks that anything short of burning a song on a CD and giving that CD to someone else is NOT illegal:
MacNET: I don't understand. Here you are downloading pirated music 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, yet you won't burn a song to CD for me. Why?

Doug: Because, like I said, it's illegal. I don't distribute the music, I only download it.

Nevermind that
a) downloading music is illegal, in the US at least
b) downloading music from eDonkey or BitTorrent IS distributing, and he freely admits to using such tools.

And to top it all off, he claims to be saving Western culture by pirating music! LOL!

This guy is asking to be sued. I think it's pretty likely within a few months, he'll be in court.

Amazing, though, that the ISPs haven't cut off his account..

Interesting idea of "middle class"

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, I know this said "upper middle class", but come on, this is a rich guy with too much money and time on his hands who has a rather interesting hobby. Anybody with 7 extra bedrooms, Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee and Grand Marnier to drink is NOT living a middle class lifestyle. Being an attorney, he probably also has the resources to fight the RIAA should they go after him, although as a downloader only he might well be right in concluding that they can't touch him.
Move along folks. Nothing to see here.

Hard to say. Here's the math

[xant]

900000 songs at an average (pulled out of a hat) of 3m each would take a little over 5 continuous years to listen to, played back to back to back, assuming he didn't attempt to listen to them more than once. (He might, at that; you could listen to several songs at once if you were only trying to pick out those high-pitched squeals they insert, but you wouldn't be able to tell much about the quality of each song, I think.) If you assume about 12 hours out of every day is reserved for sleeping and misc. rather than music listening, he could listen to his entire collection in 10 years if he never repeated. To be frank, this is a little hard to believe, but it is within the realm of possibility.

Re:What Disconnect?

[cpt kangarooski]

Sharing an MP3 music file ... without charge: This is LEGAL unless your doing this as part of a business plan or promotion. You can have a website full of MP3's as long as it is not a business site, you are not selling ad space etc. If you can afford it, have fun.

Yeah, see, that's the part that is simply wrong, at least with regards to US law.

Copyright infringement occurs, per 17 USC 501, whenever someone violates one of the exclusive rights of the copyright holder. Two of those exclusive rights are set out in 17 USC 106.

One of them is the exclusive right to reproduce the work. Another is the exclusive right to distribute the work.

When you download a work, reproduction necessarily occurs. When you provide a work on a server for people to download, distribution occurs.

Thus, sharing anything, if it is copyrighted, and if you are not authorized by the relevant copyright holders to do so, is illegal. There are various exemptions. In the case of ordinary people sharing mp3s in an otherwise infringing manner, even if not for charge, no exemptions apply.

There is, actually, an exemption for sharing certain sound recordings and music via certain media such as analog cassette tapes. But that's not applicable to mp3s via websites and filesharing networks.

If you have a cite to a case or a statute, I'd love to see it. But you pretty certainly don't, at least not one that is valid or that you have read properly. (People invariably seem to misread 17 USC 1008 -- it annoys me. Read 1001, and read RIAA v. Diamond for what 1008 actually means, if you're going to cite it.)

Re:I wonder

[WebCowboy]

You misspelled "giggabyte"

Thank you for the correction, Mr. Quayle

Re:He's a what? He's a what?

[djdavetrouble]

What he is trying to do is literally impossible. Furthermore he already has more music in his collection than he could ever listen to in his lifetime. I have been collecting vinyl for some 25 years, and come across his species before. They collect and collect and bag the records up in protective sleeves and lord over their super rare *SEALED* original pressing of "The Skullsnaps", or "24 Karat Black", which has never had a chip of diamond touch it to release the magic contained within. Compare this to the mindset of a deejay, who buys record upon record, and can't wait to play it in public so anyone within earshot can enjoy (or hate, some dj's have a cruel streak).... Just because you are an obsessive collector doesn't mean you can actually enjoy what you collect. Its like the plot from Toy Story 2, where they are collecting rare toys, when they really should be in the loving hands of a child.

I have several chicago blues indie records from the 1940's and 1950's that are one of a kinds
I am not too familiar with copyright law, but my father told me that when you become the owner of a recording that noone else has, you gain the rights to reproduce and sell said recording. There have been several precedents of this. Maybe you should copy your one of a kinds and get it out to some other collectors before something happens and they are lost to the world altogether.

Interesting!

[BLKMGK]

He seems to think our way of life is doomed and that we're fighting WWIII but midway through the interview he's talking about how it's going to be a decade before everyone has "gone digital". So do we or don't we have a bright future where the world "goes digital" and we all hum along together?

King? I don't think so ...

[really?]

This guy is WAY behind. About two and a half years ago I used to have access to a "box" belonging to a guy in Korea ... he was pulling in an avarage of 150 albums a day and had been doing so for a while. He already had close to 700.000 songs at that time ...

Re:What Disconnect?

[Beautyon]

There is, actually, an exemption for sharing certain sound recordings and music via certain media such as analog cassette tapes. But that's not applicable to mp3s via websites and filesharing networks.

Says you. New York Fair use (now The New York Association of Copyright Stakeholders) say different:

I will quote again, for your benefit:

Recent Copyright Issues

Recent trends in the law in response to the internet and the advent of digital medium have assaulted Copyright. Among the recent laws passed which threaten Copyright is the Digital Millennium Act which Congress passed in 1998 in response to pressure from the broadcast and mass media industry in the US. Another law recently passed which attempts to destroy Copyright is the Sony Bono Copyright Extension Act.

Since Copyright can not be legal without Fair Use, both of these laws, among others making rounds on the Federal and State level, are undermining the legal and moral foundation of Copyright. New Yorkers for Fair Use is an organization which is determined to protect the validity of Copyright law by protecting Fair Use and dispelling misinformation on Copyright.

We would like you to know, first and foremost what is a legal use of Copyrighted material and what is not.

First of all: Can I own an idea, song, work of art, writing or other creative work of abstract human intellect?

No - One can not own an idea, even if you created it. You can only own a limited license called a Copyright or patent to exploit your idea for comercial purposes, or not to exploit it if you choose to. Intellectual Property is a misuse of language often used to confuse people about their rights and responsibilities. It is similar to "The Democratic Republic of China" By supporting responsible Copyright legislation, you can best protect your rights under Copyright.

1. Copying a Copyrighted work.
2. Making an archive of Copyrighted works.
3. Editing a Copyrighted work.
4. Distributing a quote from a Copyrighted work within an original work for the purposes of discussing that work.
5. Giving a copy of a Copyrighted work to a friend without a charge or other monetary consideration.
6. Using the Copyrighted work without permission of the Copyright holder in a way the Copyright holder did not initially approve of in its sale of the work to you.
7. Destroying your copy of the Copyrighted work.
8. Travelling with the Copyrighted work into a different jurisdiction.
9. Selling your copy of the Copyrighted work.

1. Making a copy of a Copyrighted work and selling it.
2. Charging for the viewing a Copyrighted work without permission of the Copyright holder.
3. Amassing a database of Copyrighted works and charging for access to that database.
4. Mixing together Copyrighted works and selling your services for reading or playing that mix.

FBI Warning on Video Tapes. The FBI Warning about copying a video tape is a lie. Owners of Copyrighted material are allowed to copy the VHS Tape for their personal use. Copying is not a crime.

Ripping CD's to MP3 files. This is LEGAL. Copying legally purchased Copyrighted material is a protected act under the Constitution.

Making copies of a Copyrighted article for a class discussion and distributing them to the class. Legal and explicit under Section 107 quoted above.

Sharing an MP3 music file, or a cassette tape of music without charge. This is LEGAL unless your doing this as part of a business plan or promotion. You can have a website full of MP3's as long as it is not a business site, you are not selling ad space etc. If you can afford it, have fun.

Copying software in a business. Illegal - Don't do it.

Copying software you own for personal use. Legal if no money is passing hands.

Sell copies of software you own and no longer use. Legal as a second sale.

Quoting bad caselaw doesnt make your case by the way.

STYX

[kevcol]

There is a horrible song by Styx called "Too Much Time On My Hands"

I wonder if he has that?

Well...

[catdevnull]

Ya gotta have goals. I suppose this guy aspires to be either the owner of the world's largest music collection or the first man publicly and savagely raped by the RIAA legal team.

Either way, he can still spell his namd "L-o-s-e-r"

ATTN: King of Music:
Dude...all day downloading music? Isn't there something better to do with all that time?

Let's do a quick calculation---900,000 songs. 3.5 minutes each on average. 3.15 million minutes of music. That's 52,500 hours or almost 6 years.

You could get 3 masters degrees; become a doctor or lawyer; travel around the world; or even troll every slashdot post. But you choose to sit at your computer doing nothing but downloading music?

You're sick, man. Can I browse your collection?

Re:I wonder

[XMyth]

I tried to RTFA, am still trying actually. I keep refreshing the page but it keeps telling me it timed out. It's strange. Almost as if everyone from Slashdot who was viewing the article lagged the hosting server so much that it is unable to respond to requests.

Has anyone ever heard of that before?

Dimnishing marginal returns

[greyfeld]

The problem with collecting music in digital format is really a lack of availability. Once you have downloaded all of the Britney Spears, Bruce Springsteen, U2 and Shania Twain songs available you are left to search for much rarer objects of desire.

It probably wasn't too hard to fill several large hard drives with this drivel, but when you begin to look into other realms of music including jazz, classical, old C&W and even punk rock you hit a dead end with services like Kazaa and iTunes.

In fact, I spend much more time converting my old LP's into CD and MP3 using Soundforge 7 (yes, I own a legal copy) than I do looking online because there just isn't that much out there of real value.

If this guy was really interested in preserving music for the rest of us, he'd be out at garage sales every weekend and converting all of the Ventures surf music to MP3 for us. There is so much music out there that is not digitized that the mark he is going to make in his lifetime is like the scratches on my Eddie Cleanhead Vinson "Kidney Stew" CD converted from LP.

Oh, and these sound so much better than the label's crappy offerings once you've removed the clicks, hiss and scratches. If you've got an old record collection, get to converting. You'll be glad you did.

I think I know who this guy is...

[OldManCoyote]

He lives in AZ, just outside of Tucson. He use to come into our private MIRC and dc++ networks, always downloading but never giving anything up. He had about 2.9 Terrabytes last year. We eventually had to ban him since he never shared. Interesting that he made the news...

Re:He's a what? He's a what?

[tlunde]

I am not too familiar with copyright law, but my father told me that when you become the owner of a recording that noone else has, you gain the rights to reproduce and sell said recording.
Your father was wrong.

There have been several precedents of this.
Name one.

ps: IAAL, but this post is intended merely as public education about copyright law and does not create an attorney/client relationship with djdavetrouble, or anyone else who reads it. Please consult with an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction if you have any questions about the law as it applies to you.

John Peel

[Alioth]

I think John Peel (now sadly deceased, a couple of weeks ago) has had him beat long ago - and legitimately too. And not just top-40 stuff - John Peel was a great force in bringing many new artists into the public consiousness.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/alt/johnpeel/index.sht ml

John Peel had many BUILDINGS filled with CDs and vinyl records and other media.